A Private Front Yard Gone Public
It is not your average front yard landscaping that awaits you behind the gate at 1619 Silver Lake Blvd., Los Angeles owned by Jenna Didier, the founder and driving force behind
Materials & Application (M&A), a non-profit research center. She describes her private front yard-gone-public as an attempt to display art and architecture in an open, publicly accessible space that welcomes anyone, from curious visitors to art connoisseurs, 24/7. Didier says she finds it disappointing that, in general, Americans do not take pride in or have sentiment for their own art, compared to Europe where everyone seems to own their national museum.
The space in front of the house, where she and Oliver Hess, the technical director, live and work had simply been converted into a laboratory/museum when the first installation was unveiled in 2002. Architects, designers and artists have the unique opportunity to experiment with formerly unused materials and fabrics, or to find new uses for traditional materials and transform them into sculpture-like installations. Didier makes it a point that the setting might be casual but the installations boast a high degree of finish.
For a lot of the artists this is the rare occasion when they actually create a full-scale piece out of ideas that are normally just left to sit on paper. Didier describes the moment when the installations are up - when they unfold themselves in their majestic dimensions - as unparalleled.
Every six months M&A places a call for proposals on websites for design competitions. Contenders should be adventurous and push the boundaries in terms of the application of materials. Didier and Hess curate the exhibitions and help the architects and artists to get funding at the same time.
At the moment, an aluminum frame and polypropylene rope structure called
Density Fields, which is only supported at one end, looms over the courtyard. The installation, by Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc) professors Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, is an arresting sight that certainly stands out from its trendy but low-key Silver Lake neighborhood. While former installations were usually separated into constituent materials and recycled, this one will remain intact and sold as a sculpture.
April 1, 2008 will be the opening date for the next exhibition with
Gravity Defiance as its theme. One can be curious of what to expect ...
Link:http://www.emanate.org
